One of my favorite photos of Nick Tanno, who died June 29 at age 87, shows him hanging out with Dean Martin.

The two handsome guys are in their prime, looking confident and finger-popping cool. Tanno could have passed for a member of the Rat Pack in that photo or Matt Helm’s right-hand man, and I suspect Martin would have welcomed him.

After all, Tanno was a scratch golfer who had once carried a PGA Tour card and had been a teaching pro for many years. He also had a better-than-fair reputation for sizing up the competition, as well as the grain of the greens. Martin would have liked that.

Longtime casino denizens will remember Tanno as an officer and general manager of the Tropicana Hotel and Casino in the late 1970s when it was going through what can easily be described as tumultuous times.

The place was rocked by an investigation into its organized-crime connections. A litany of regulatory violations and nasty bankruptcy litigation haunted the place for years.

Tanno didn’t come away unscathed, but he kept his cool and emerged with his trademark smile intact. Besides, the best part of those years didn’t come from being a casino general manager or shooting under par at the Tropicana Country Club, but from marrying the former Janice Poland and starting a family that includes sons Nicholas and Alexander and daughter Chiara.

In later years, he was a manager at Fellini’s restaurant at a time when it ranked with the most popular dining spots in Las Vegas. Nick was in his element in that atmosphere and I spent many hours listening to his stories of the characters he’d encountered at country clubs and casinos.

Born in 1934 in Cleveland, Nick picked up golf early and received a scholarship to Florida Southern College. After a hitch in the Army with service in Korea and Germany, he returned to the U.S. and managed to pick up where he left off on the course, earning a PGA Tour card.

As a head pro at Shawnee on Delaware in the Poconos and the Indian Creek Country Club in Miami, he taught and befriended a parade of stars from the sports and entertainment fields. You won’t find many people who were on friendly terms with Packers head coach Vince Lombardi and Jackie Gleason, Dean Martin, and Joe Pesci, but Nick knew them all.

Tanno’s time on and off the Strip reminds me of how much Las Vegas has changed its approach to its outlaw heritage.

The Tropicana was once among the most notorious casinos in the history of a notorious town. Two decades after Joe Agosto’s connections with the Civella mob family of Kansas City were exposed, the wheel of fortune turned.

By 2011, the Tropicana tried to cash in on the very past Las Vegas had worked so hard to put behind it. It celebrated a sanitized version of those dangerous days with the Mob Experience exhibit, a fun, though historically flawed, effort that attempted to match downtown’s better-funded Las Vegas Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, known to all as the Mob Museum.

In a conversation with Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Jane Ann Morrison around the time of the opening, Janice Tanno experienced the Mob Experience and concluded that she and her husband were “white hats who knew the bad hats.”

Truth be told, Nick and Janice Tanno were not alone in that designation in the Las Vegas that existed not so long ago.

A celebration of Tanno’s life is scheduled for 2 p.m. Saturday, July 9, at the Italian American Club at 2333 E. Sahara Avenue in Las Vegas.